Posted on 5-5-2002
Red
Right And Blue
by George Monbiot, Guardian. Intro by stu@ihug.co.nz
Intro:
Monbiot discusses an issue that has been sneaking around without
much
attention for a while - the attempt by fairly right wing political
structures to fit themselves into the big social issues being
raised by the
left.
While he gives European and UK examples, I can also relate the
way that
Mai-Not (the group where I get many of these articles) had for
some months
a subscriber who represented Pauline Hansons One Nation party.
Initially
their input was at the obvious intersection of interests - effects
of
globablisation. But as it got more obviously racist, the person
was
'invited' to leave the group and finally did so when it became
obvious that
the dodgy theories had no takers.
Similarly in the US, hard right take-to-the-hills-with-weapons
factions
have long railed against globalisation and for nationalism.
I've yet to
hear of them taking up environmental interests though. Finally,
perhaps NZ
is ahead of Monbiot in that it has already taken a strategy
similar to what
he outlines at the end of the article - the discussions and
formation of a
network for peace and justice at the start of the year have
resulted in an
embryonic group. Time will tell if this becomes an effective
group but its
interesting that George follows the same line of argument.
Guardian, Tuesday April 30, 2002
The polling stations had scarcely closed before Le Pen's success
was being
blamed on the greens and the new left. The leader of France's
Front
National, commentators on both sides of the Channel agree, had
done so well
because the radicals first established the political territory
he
exploited, then split the leftwing vote. Both charges are ridiculous.
The
space seized by Le Pen was not created or fragmented by the
critics of
inequality, corporate power and environmental destruction, but
by the
inequality, the power and the destruction themselves, and the
abject
failure of Lionel Jospin to address them.
But there is no question that the far right, just as it has
always sought
to ride on the back of the labour movement, is now seeking to
climb aboard
the unleaded bandwagon driven by the new progressives. There
is also no
question that we have been far too slow to push the racists
off. The far
right has scarcely hidden its attempt to ride our truck. An
article on the
British National Party's website explains that "there is a huge
gap in the
political market here". While its members might have expected
the BNP to
side with its traditional allies, the landlords, against the
greens, "the
Country Landowners' Association... has 50,000 members", while
"the National
Trust and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds... have
4,000,000
members. Which interest group would you rather have on our side
come
polling day?"
So the BNP now thunders about the loss of small farms, the overuse
of
pesticides, genetic engineering, the destruction of landscape
features and
(neatly fusing its new politics with its old) soil erosion.
This is just
one of the means by which it hopes to "harness the 'green' idealism
of
middle-class youth, and to give a new vision to many of their
working class
contemporaries in the cities". Citing Noam Chomsky and, to my
horror, my
own work, it has also begun campaigning against corporate power,
the World
Bank, the private finance initiative, the disposal of council
houses and
the dominance of the superstores. The BNP is not the only force
on the far
right which now describes itself as "the true green party".
Similar claims
have been made by members of Le Pen's Front National, by the
Vlaams Blok in
Belgium and, in Britain, by a tiny offshoot of the National
Front which
calls itself Third Way. This is the group which most clearly
articulates
the direction in which the politics of the hard right are shifting.
Third Way, which was founded in 1990 by the front's former chairman
and
vice-chairman, claims to reject "racism and the politics of
hate". But it
believes that cultures should, for their own good, be kept apart,
and
defended from "mass immigration". Globalisation, the splinter
group claims,
"reduces us to a rootless, transient population disconnected
from its
history", precipitating ecological crisis and encouraging migration.
According to Searchlight magazine, the party's chairman, Patrick
Harrington, has stayed in touch with the far right Italian terrorists
Massimo Morsello and Roberto Fiore. He has also made contact
with the black
separatist Nation of Islam and orthodox Jews pursuing "separate
development". Third Way, like many far-right groups, has abandoned
overt
racist aggression in favour of cultural isolation.
Much of the intellectual work underpinning Third Way's policies
has been
conducted by a Dr Aidan Rankin. The position statement he wrote
for the
group blames indigenous people's loss of land and sovereignty
partly on
corporations and brutal governments, but also on "leftwing cultural
prejudice", feminism, human rights and the politics of "tolerance"
and
"inclusion". Oddly conflating it with assimilation, Rankin sees
multiculturalism as a globalising force which forbids tribal
people to lead
their own, culturally pristine lives. He then goes on to suggest
that "we
are all indigenous peoples now", our "voices... silenced, our
language
castrated" by "political correctness" and gender equality. Nick
Griffin of
the BNP takes this analysis a small step further when he claims
to be
defending the "endangered white tribes of the first world".
It should be a
cause of grave concern to everyone in the green movement that
Dr Aidan
Rankin was, until very recently, the comment editor of Britain's
leading
environmental magazine, the Ecologist.
This is not the first occasion on which the Ecologist (which
despite
Rankin's bizarre appointment remains, by and large, a progressive
paper)
has found itself in trouble of this kind. The previous editorial
team split
with its founder Teddy Goldsmith after he addressed a meeting
of the hard
right Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes pour la Civilisation
Europeenne.
Goldsmith, whose politics are a curious mixture of radical and
reactionary,
has advocated the enforced separation of Tutsis and Hutus in
Rwanda and
Protestants and Catholics in Ulster, on the grounds that they
constitute
"distinct ethnic groups" and are thus culturally incapable of
cohabitation.
Goldsmith, as the former editors later pointed out in their
paper "Blood
and culture", assumes that culture is a rigid, immutable thing:
that
different communities can live only within the boxes nature
has assigned to
them. Confusing, for example, Protestantism and unionism, he
fails to
understand the political forces which cause splits within communities
and
associations between them. He fails, too, to see the external
manipulation
which first defines ethnicity inflexibly, then drives the newly
separated
peoples to fight.
The far right claims to be contesting an imperialist homogenisation,
but at
the same time it is developing one of its own: telling people
which culture
they belong to and what its characteristics should be. It has
simply
reinvented the ghetto. By seeking to pre-empt the far right
with "tough"
policies on crime and immigration, Jospin and Tony Blair have
moved the
game on to its home turf. A far more intelligent strategy would
have been
to resecure the new territory the racists are exploiting, by
getting tough
on inequality, environmental damage, corporate power and new
imperialism.
This is the left's own ground, on which the right will always
be scrambling
to catch up.
But those of us whose clothes are being stolen also have a responsibility:
not to leave them lying around in the first place. We must define
our
intent more carefully. "Globalisation" means whatever you want
it to, so
people who call themselves "anti-globalisation" campaigners
are leaving
their laundry outside the BNP's door. A tighter fit, such as
the "social
justice" or "internationalist" movement would at least ensure
that our
unattended kecks were harder for other people to climb into.
Pluralism and
anti-racism must be not supplementary aims, but core values,
around which
all the others are built.
Anti-racism is not just about defending the victims of abuse.
It is also
about defending ourselves from becoming the unwitting accomplices
of those
who would seek a segregated world.
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